Retrieving surface peat moisture in an Albertan bog with Radarsat-2

• Author / Creator

  Chen, Yingxiu

• Boreal peatlands are widely considered as an important carbon sink. Peat moisture is important for controlling carbon sequestration and smouldering combustion. Retrieving surface moisture is of great interest for carbon budget modelling and fire management in peatlands.
  To monitor at a large scale, Radarsat-2 was used to retrieve surface (0-5 cm) peat moisture in an Albertan ombrotrophic bog. Oven-dried peat cores, FDR probes (Theta probe) and TDR probes (CS616) were used for the field sampling of volumetric moisture content (VMC). Non-polarimetric analysis was performed to extract backscattering coefficients from Radarsat-2 images in NEST. The model was built with multiple linear regression in SAS. This approach shows promise for the burned plots (concordance correlation coefficient ρ: 0.435; accuracy: 0.997), followed by all sampled plots (ρ: -0.254; accuracy: 0.962) and unburned plots (ρ: 0.153; accuracy: 0.821).

• Subjects / Keywords

  • SAR
  • Carbon
  • Peatland fire management
  • Concordance correlation coefficient
  • Remote sensing
  • Peat surface moisture
  • RADARSAT-2
  • Peatlands

• Graduation date

  Fall 2013

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3J398

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.